


a flame that never dies

by Prospect



Series: the sun will rise [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Canonical Character Death, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, Magic, POV Third Person, Present Tense, Wizarding Wars (Harry Potter)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:54:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26152237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prospect/pseuds/Prospect
Summary: They move, flitting from safe house to safe house, pursued across Britain by the shadow of death that is always hot on their heels, and the months fly by and the safe houses grow fewer and fewer. Yet they survive.They fight, targeted attacks and ambushes of opportunity, curses flying, striking back at the never-ending tide of masked enemies, and the people hide in their houses while they bleed in the streets. Yet they continue to fight.They plan, poring over maps and lists of names, coordinating cells of those who still have the fire of resistance in their eyes, and every year the lists of their own grow shorter and the lists of the dead grow longer. Yet they do not surrender.They call themselves the Friends of the ABC.
Relationships: Les Amis de l'ABC Friendship
Series: the sun will rise [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1899115
Kudos: 2





	a flame that never dies

**Author's Note:**

> Mind that archive warning.

They move, flitting from safe house to safe house, pursued across Britain by the shadow of death that is always hot on their heels, and the months fly by and the safe houses grow fewer and fewer. Yet they survive.

They fight, targeted attacks and ambushes of opportunity, curses flying, striking back at the never-ending tide of masked enemies, and the people hide in their houses while they bleed in the streets. Yet they continue to fight.

They plan, poring over maps and lists of names, coordinating cells of those who still have the fire of resistance in their eyes, and every year the lists of their own grow shorter and the lists of the dead grow longer. Yet they do not surrender.

They are the Friends of the ABC.

Their symbol is the phoenix.

-🜂-

The world ended when Enjolras was in his third year at Hogwarts. He didn’t notice, at the time. Head full of causes and injustices and History essays and Charms homework and his seeming inability to produce a corporeal Patronus, nevermind how the textbooks reassured him that it was _advanced_ , and the Dark Lord was only entries in history books and rumours on the wind, a shapeless shadow one could rail against but not quite see. None of them could see.

It was already too late, by then.

By his fourth year, the echoed rumours had taken solid shape, and trapped in school robes and castle walls Enjolras rallied a ragtag student newspaper around him. The Prophet was a rag and the Ministry was lying; and they were sitting in class while the world came to pieces. He organized meetings in the Room of Requirement; corresponded with graduates; talked back to teachers; was threatened with expulsion no less than seventeen times. Fifth year came with attacks splattered across the news and there was no hiding the truth anymore. The student newspaper became a defence society. By June that year, Enjolras could finally produce a corporeal Patronus off the impossible light of standing alongside them; he conjured up the silver phoenix at his Defence OWL, an excuse for not having studied.

Then in the summer before his sixth year, the Ministry fell; Hogwarts was overtaken; the Muggle-Born Registration Commission was created. 

There didn't seem to be much point in going back to Hogwarts after that. Enjolras tried, nonetheless; it seemed wrong to abandon the place that had become his second home, or those who dwelt within its walls, and besides the Trace still clung to him like so much cobweb. Yet though his blood was beyond reproach, his behaviour clearly wasn't; five weeks in he and a small group of friends and _Friends_ were fleeing through a secret passageway, tumbling out into the Hog’s Head, disappearing into the night. Courfeyrac was with him then, and Joly, who was a year above them both; but Combeferre, also in his seventh year and Head Boy, had stayed behind. “Someone has to hold down the fort around here,” he had told them.

In the dim back room of a café they convened with their correspondents and contemporaries, the graduates, allies outside the castle walls: Feuilly, forger of false papers; Bossuet, an unlikely eye inside the Ministry; Jehan, who religiously read the Quibbler; Bahorel, veteran of fire-starting literal and figurative; Grantaire, there despite it all. They spoke of sedition. They began to plan.

(Combeferre joined them after his graduation, head full of secrets and arms full of books, shadows in his eyes and new graduates at his heels.)

Somehow Enjolras, one of the youngest of them, became a chief of sorts, though he disavowed the title. Still they recognized his words, and they recognized his bird, and people came to their banner, not many, but they came nonetheless, offering up their lives in their hands—

They were heroes in the making.

(They were a tragedy.)

-🜂-

Musichetta’s always willing to put them up for a few nights, although Joly and Bossuet fret about it. She’s less understanding of them bleeding all over her furniture, but it’s Bossuet and he’s always had a bad time with Apparition. Grantaire was there to see the instructor re-attach three of his fingers during Apparition exams in sixth year, after he’d already Splinched all his hair off in lessons.

Unfortunately, this time around Bossuet's left his fingers in yet another safe house to strike off the list, and so there’s nothing to do but watch Joly mutter charms and apply dittany. Bossuet’s cheerful enough about it, anyways—jokes about how he left his fingers as a gift and he never really needed them anyways and there are certainly _other_ parts he’d rather keep—but Musichetta just shakes her head. Grantaire toasts her hospitality.

(He hears them talking, in low voices, after they think he’s fallen asleep on the table. “Do you ever think of stopping?” Musichetta asks. He doesn’t catch the reply.)

But the next morning Combeferre’s silver swan flies in to call them to London and they’re off again, leap-frogging across the map, like if they stop it’ll be the end of them.

-🜂-

It’s not anyone who’ll choose a life like this, a life of near-misses and hasty escapes, a life where the future is merely a pinhole of distant light amidst the hungry darkness of the present. They all have their own reasons for joining the fight. There’s the blood in their veins and the deaths they carry in their hearts; there’s the people they love that this world won't allow for; there’s the principles they cannot abandon. And then there’s faith: the pure blazing belief that they can change the world, that the dawn Enjolras speaks of will truly come to pass. The dream is bright; and the rest of them are bright, too, when they believe it.

Grantaire, well, he thinks of himself more as a moth drawn to their light. Maybe he’ll burn; maybe they’ll all burn; but it is warm by the flame, and it is light that gives form to things.

(Musichetta’s a Muggle, and there’s no reason she should ever have gotten mixed up in this, but for the boys who loved her enough to tell her about their world and the danger that threatens her own. Maybe that’s all there is, or maybe she’s one of their believers, too—bright, and warm, and doomed.)

-🜂-

Courfeyrac runs the radio programme. Once upon a time he commentated Quidditch matches; today he goes by _Knight_ on air and tells the people of Britain about the news as it _really_ is, somber when there are deaths, cracking jokes to make them laugh again. It must be impossible to listen and not love him. 

The rest of them contribute, too, swapping out there and again, whenever they’re in the room. Combeferre, _Lightning_ , balances the philosophical and educational; Jehan, _Myrrdin_ , recites poetry; Joly, _Merry_ , reminds people to look after their health. Sometimes Feuilly, _Eagle_ , comes on air and they’ll sprinkle their episode with French, with Polish, with whatever other language they can get their hands on, like someone somewhere else might listen, like some foreign government might be moved to pity for Britain lost in the night. 

(Marius, third-year Ravenclaw, finds their channel by accident while twiddling with the dials of his grandfather’s radio, and recognizes the voice of the fifth-year who once helped him out of a trick staircase and lent him five Sickles and a cat. 

He sits through an entire episode before it occurs to him that perhaps it might be forbidden.)

-🜂-

They do not make it through their battles unscathed. Some the war marks more visibly than others. Bahorel, scarred, trades the illicit Animagus form of a rooster for a wolf that appears when the moon is full and round. Jehan shatters his wing in the form of a Threstral and never flies again. Bossuet’s second wand breaks; his third detests him. Joly limps and Courfeyrac cracks open his collection of fashionable canes.

Day in and day out, the threat of death hangs over them all—but worse than death is the threat of capture. Death is simple and unerring; capture is a morass of speculation, the promise of a nightmare. They’ve heard what happens to those who are captured.

Combeferre teaches them Occlumency out of a book. They ask security questions, disguise themselves, confide nothing lightly—all while knowing it may not be enough. Someday they may be staring into the end of a Cruciatus Curse, and only then will they know what their resolve amounts to.

They know what they will do, if they are cornered. 

There’s grim talk of other measures, too. Poison pills. Artifacts. Unbreakable Vows, worded carefully. Grim talk, and slow talk, too, that comes to no conclusion and leaves the air heavier and the shadows darker.

None of them have needed them, yet.

-🜂-

Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac disappear off the map after a gathering in Cornwall. The next weeks are bad ones. Feuilly steps up to speak to their followers and send them where they need to be; Bahorel maintains their connections and charges into battle with more fervour than ever before; Joly runs himself ragged mending war wounds and curses. Grantaire drinks himself into stupors, falling further and further down some black and bitter abyss.

But Courfeyrac was the Secret-Keeper for the Corinthe, and the secret remains kept; so he must still be alive. 

Mid-October three interlopers appear at the Corinthe and Feuilly holds them at wandpoint. “Why did you go to the hospital wing in your first year?” he asks.

“Electrocution,” admits Combeferre, hands in the air, his wand holstered at his belt alongside a second captured from a Death Eater.

(“I cannot believe,” Bossuet says at the reunion, “that the three of you went camping without us,” and they laugh, and for the moment they are all still alive.)

-🜂-

They did not all know each other at Hogwarts. The divides of age were great. Bahorel was intent on failing his seventh year at the same time Feuilly was the newest Ravenclaw prefect at the same time Enjolras was taking his first steps into the Great Hall, sitting beneath the hat: _You could be great in Slytherin—_

So. Grantaire was friends with Bossuet was friends with Joly was friends with Combeferre was friends with Enjolras and Courfeyrac and they had other bonds, connections, acquaintances, a great web—but they did not all know each other at Hogwarts. 

Still, they are all friends now; it would be impossible not to be, _les Amis de l’ABC_. They are not often in one place, but there are always lazy evenings with Grantaire rambling, Courfeyrac debating Combeferre, Joly fretting, Jehan leading a song, Enjolras among them all, listening, with the certainty that they are in this together.

-🜂-

But as for their families—

Well.

Best not to dwell on it.

(Combeferre doesn’t dare write to his mother; Joly’s parents were forced to flee; Courfeyrac fears seeing his father at the end of his wand.

Bahorel visits his parents irregularly, every few months; it is on one of these visits that he disappears. Jean Prouvaire finds him proceeding towards the manor home of a Death Eater.

“I am going to burn that house down,” Bahorel says. 

“Dusk,” suggests Jehan. “We’ll watch the sparks fly up at the first few stars.”

They return lightly singed and smelling of smoke. The conflagration is in the news the next day. Enjolras is furious: Courfeyrac admiring; all, to some extent, concerned. Bahorel ceases to visit his parents.)

-🜂-

There are things they keep: Feuilly and Combeferre’s Prefect badges, Ravenclaws three years apart; a handmade Chocolate Frog card of Sir Luckless from the Fountain of Fair Fortune, commissioned from Feuilly by Joly for Bossuet; the first edition of the ABC. More than that they hold onto the memories of brighter days: Courfeyrac slipping cats into the first-year dorms, the spectacular and catastrophic plays Jehan and Bahorel arranged, the animated map passed down from Bahorel to Grantaire to Combeferre to a Ravenclaw kid with a habit of getting lost. By day they speak of how some future tomorrow will be bright again; by night, drinking together, they simply sing of days gone by.

-🜂-

(Enjolras turned seventeen a week after his hasty departure from Hogwarts. Courfeyrac had conspired to acquire him a pocket watch. It was a simple gold thing engraved with the words _It will come,_ and Enjolras keeps with him always, feeling it tick, like the beating of a second heart. When he thinks of the past he remembers the generosity of friends; when he casts his thoughts to the future he imagines the better day that is surely drawing nearer every second.)

-🜂-

They ferry people over to France, sometimes, Muggle-borns and those accused of sedition: false papers by Feuilly, Bahorel’s French contacts, Bossuet still somehow holding down his Ministry internship, slipping them dates, places, times. Some are thankful: the father of a little girl, donating his business savings. Others are merely consumed by fear. More than once they’ve rescued those captured by Snatchers or bound for Azkaban, curses flying and Patronuses running amok, and brought them to safety.

Yet the prison itself—

—that is another matter.

-🜂-

Enjolras hated Azkaban long before he knew of Death Eaters, long before the Ministry fell, long before Muggle-borns were interned there. He hated it not out of any personal connection, but simply because it Was. In his eyes it was inimical to the world he wished to bring about. 

So, in a manner of speaking, the mission was almost a decade in the making; for years it was an addendum, a possibility, a pipe dream; for months it was a reality, in the frenzy of drilling their recruits on the Patronus charm, acquiring the hairs of Aurors as Joly brewed Polyjuice potion, ensuring there would be distractions on the day of—

When they finally arrive, it is an inevitability.

-🜂-

Here are the moments they will remember:

Courfeyrac, wearing the face of an Auror, charming their way past the defences with a wink and a smile.

Bahorel, sauntering down the hall, blasting open cells left and right, laughing in the face of darkness as he hurls bricks and Patronuses at approaching Dementors.

Joly, pressing chocolate into the hands of the tormented, Chocolate Wands and frogs that leap and Muggle bars in crinkly packaging.

Jehan, shifting out of the form of a skeletal horse to conjure up a silvery replica, sending his Patronus to walk with a weeping woman while he stands, undefended, until she finds her way.

Feuilly, Disillusioning the prisoners, passing them broomsticks and false papers, showing them maps and telling them where to seek shelter. 

Combeferre, genius, planting Muggle explosives in their wake, and organizing the soon-to-be escapees around his unauthorized Portkeys with no more fanfare than if they were campfires.

Bossuet, miracle-worker, landing an entire carriage drawn by Abraxan Winged Horses upon the top of the prison, and greeting them as they emerge.

Enjolras, leading the way, the first up the new level, first down the corridor, phoenix brightly blazing, and floors upon floors of stone and misery press down upon them but in the moment when the firebird falters, a second joins it: he looks to his side and sees Grantaire.

-🜂-

They lose two leaders that day. Bahorel falls to a curse covering their escape as the Aurors arrive; they don't manage to retrieve his body before they are off, off and away again, fingers pressed to the final Portkey.

As for Jean Prouvaire, they hold out hope that he found his way out, perhaps on a broomstick, or the illegal flying rugs Feuilly had procured, or the Disillusioned carriage they'd pawned off to a team of recruits. But the battle winds up; they treat their wounds; Joly forces more chocolate upon them; Enjolras makes contact with the other groups; and no one has found Jehan.

(They hope he was lost in the explosions, perhaps, as Azkaban fell apart around them; or to the sea. They hope he was not captured, and they hope no Dementor Kissed him, but they never find out.)

They sing Jehan's poetry. They care for his plants ( _O_ in Herbology, dittany and bulbous cacti and fanged flowers all blooming beneath his touch). They remember him. And they remember Bahorel, too, larger than life, the oldest of them, for many of them an inspiration: already a revolutionary while they were in school. 

It is all they can do, to remember.

-🜂-

Things are different, after that. They used to joke about the bounties, comparing the prices on their heads: Bahorel the arsonist of manors, Courfeyrac who once beat back three Death Eaters with a cane, Enjolras's meteoric rise from escaped schoolboy to rebel leader. Now, after what they made of Azkaban, after Bossuet's spectacular resignation of his Ministry position, the risk is real and present: bounties hiked up, faces plastered across the Prophet, Snatchers scouring the countryside. They abandon the secret places that are not secret anymore; they gather in number ever more rarely and sleep with one eye open.

An old man named Mabeuf, sheltering Enjolras and Combeferre for the night, dies covering their escape. Joly and Bossuet cease staying at Musichetta's.

The hunting of the enemy is relentless.

The people do not rise to join them.

-🜂-

Here are the things the war makes them do: Combeferre, retreating from battle when his every instinct cries for him to help the wounded. Courfeyrac, coordinating a defence, letting two strongholds fall so that a third may survive. Enjolras, disarming a looter in their ranks and counting down the seconds to his death on his pocket watch. 

Here are the things that, surer than claws and spies and hails of curses, destroy them.

-🜂-

“They say that killing splits your soul,” Combeferre comments one night, twirling a quill about his fingers with the nimbleness that used to make people urge him to Quidditch. “We looked into it. There are rituals—very obscure, very Dark—that make use of it, you know, tearing off a piece and putting it somewhere. They mutilate you.”

That was the research he and Jehan had conducted, using books stolen from Hogwarts and family libraries, on how it was Voldemort had come to return. Enjolras sets aside the rosters he’d been poring over and pays attention. “Your findings?”

“It’s possible.” Combeferre tosses the quill into the air and catches it; his voice is weary. “Theoretically, a piece of his soul would anchor the rest of his soul to this world, even past the death of his body, until its receptable was destroyed. Of course, the trouble is that the receptacle could be anything, really, and anywhere. At his side—at Hogwarts—somewhere in Albania, which is probably where he first returned—”

They don't have time to go haring off to Albania.

After a moment, Combeferre resumes. “It’s always interested me, you know, the way magic interacts with emotion, and with human notions of moral behaviour. The most powerful protective charms are cast from love. The basis of the Fidelius Charm is trust. Dark magic relies on the intent to harm. And murder—murder splits the soul.”

In his pocket, Enjolras feels the _tick, tick, tick_ of seconds counting down.

“As it should,” he says. “Someday—”

Someday.

-🜂-

There comes a day when they are all cloistered in the Corinthe, fifty men and the rest of them who are alive. The Death Eaters, stationed outside, renew the Anti-Disapparition Jinxes by the hour; they cannot see the place to enter it, yet they know they are there. A spy is tied-up in the basement; someone should kill him, though no one has.

Enjolras's jaw clenches as he gazes out the window. He thinks of their dwindling provisions; he thinks of their maps, the places crossed off; he thinks of the ledgers of the dead. He thinks of the first wand that chose him, which had burned in his fifth year; and he thinks of the second, _cypress is the wood of heroes,_ the spring before Ollivander disappeared. He thinks of sitting beneath the Sorting Hat, and the cheering of the red-and-gold. 

He says, "Let us catch them by surprise, at least."

-🜂-

He says a lot more than that, before they go out.

-🜂-

_For we are entering a tomb all flooded by the dawn—_

Marius, a sixth-year now, hears their last broadcast. So too do an old man and his young daughter in Paris. So too do the others in their houses, with their curtains drawn closed, and the volume turned down.

_Let others rise to take our place—_

_—until the Earth is free._

-🜂-

They do take the Death Eaters by surprise; and as their foes press fingers to Dark Marks, summoning reinforcements, Combeferre is disarming the wands out of their hands, Feuilly is coordinating a hail of spells from the upstairs windows, Joly is doling out drops of Felix Felicis. Courfeyrac ducks and the curse bound for his face obliterates his hat instead. A powder-keg rolls out the front doors and they take cover as it blows. 

But then the tide turns; the ranks of the enemy seem unending; and in the storm of lightning that composes the battle they fall, one by one in their turn. Kneeling behind cover, Enjolras sees Combeferre hit by three bolts of light as he tries to revive an unconscious man. Somewhere else the secret of the Corinthe has died with Courfeyrac; a Death Eater grabs a rebel emerging from the wine-shop, the two of them tumble inside, and then the fortress is breached. 

Enjolras considers it a credit to them, at least, that the monster who rules Britain deigns to show up himself. Disarmed, backed into a corner, offered survival— _every drop of magical blood spilled is a terrible waste_ —he takes the opportunity to spit at the tyrant's feet. The choice between joining his friends and bowing down is no choice at all.

And he thinks that’s the end of him but then there's Grantaire, rising from the darkness and stepping to his side, as he did once in the depths of a prison—

"Do you permit it?" he asks.

Enjolras takes his hand and in the moment before the green light takes them he swears he sees the dawn—

-☉-

_Said the day to the night: “I shall die with thee, and thou shalt be born again with me.”_

-☉-

The Death Eaters burn the place down; or they try, anyways. Wood burns; alcohol and gunpowder burn; yet stone does not.

And there, on the stone wall, carved words they do not stop to read still speak to passers-by:

_LONG LIVE THE PEOPLES._

-☉-

Someday, Marius Pontmercy is sitting with a child on his knee, recounting dim recollections from his school days: being introduced, wide-eyed, to the merry bombardment of a defence society, by a student who had been kind to him and whom he never repaid. The Head Boy in his second year lighting his wand in the darkness, showing them a broom closet that could become whatever they needed, because Hogwarts looked after its own. The gift of a map that moved. Listening to a faraway friend on the radio, year after year, the volume turned low and with an eye out for his grandfather. Learning the true reason he had never met his father.

And someday Cosette is sitting at his side, and she murmurs the tale of a girl who made the air sing when she laughed, and whose father so feared for her that he spirited her away to France; she takes out the false papers crafted and Transfigured by a steady artist's hand and speaks of the dimly-remembered man in the scarlet waistcoat who accompanied them across and whom she knew only as a _friend, un ami_. She says, _My papa told me about Azkaban._

And someday the two of them are standing at the platform of King's Cross, ready to wave good-bye to their children; and they are not afraid.

Someday.

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies for errors! It's been a while since I've read Harry Potter and I basically cut out most of the canon characters and made shit up. I hope this makes sense nonetheless.
> 
> It's possible that I will someday write more stuff for this AU; if I do they'll be published in its series.


End file.
